Bangladesh is the second-largest contributor of uniformed personnel to UN Peacekeeping. It currently deploys more than 6,600 military and police personnel to nine peacekeeping missions in Abyei, CAR, DR Congo, Haiti, Lebanon, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan and Western Sahara.

While the day will be marked at UNHQ on Friday, UN missions and offices around the world will commemorate the Day on May 29.

During a special ceremony, Secretary-General Guterres will award the ‘Captain Mbaye Diagne Medal for Exceptional Courage’ posthumously to Private Chancy Chitete of Malawi.

The medal is named after a Senegalese peacekeeper killed in Rwanda in 1994 after saving countless civilian lives.

This is the first time the medal will be awarded since the inaugural medal was presented to Captain Diagne’s family in his honour in 2016.

In a video message, Guterres said they honour more than a million men and women who have served as UN peacekeepers since their first mission in 1948.

“We remember the more than 3,800 personnel who paid the ultimate price. And we express our deepest gratitude to the 100,000 civilian, police and military peacekeepers deployed around the world today and to the countries that contribute these brave and dedicated women and men,” he said.

The global theme for this year’s commemoration is ‘Protecting Civilians, Protecting Peace’.

Jean-Pierre Lacroix, Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations, said the UN Peacekeeping deploys to some of the most complex and difficult places, protecting some of the world’s most vulnerable.

“We are working in partnership with Member States to implement the Secretary-General’s Action for Peacekeeping initiative to strengthen peacekeeping, including to improve how we protect civilians, which is at the heart of our work. For hundreds of millions, peacekeeping is the last best hope and it needs all our support,” Lacroix said.

The International Day of UN Peacekeepers was established by the General Assembly in 2002 to pay tribute to all men and women serving in peacekeeping, and to honour the memory of those who have lost their lives in the cause of peace.

The General Assembly designated May 29 as the International Day of UN Peacekeepers in commemoration of the day in 1948 when the UN’s first peacekeeping mission, the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), began operations in Palestine.